History of the Sun3 Series

What is a Sun3-Computer? These are
Workstations and
Servers from
Sun Microsystems
which were manufactured between 1985 and 1990.
They have Motorola 68020 and 68030 processors and use
Unix as
operating system.
New machines costed from $10000 up to $50000, today they're
old iron. But other than a PC or a Mac they are extremely
reliable and performing quite good. Ok, they look quite ugly slow
compared to a Pentium-III 500 MHz, but in their days they were
quite fast and have a huge I/O throughput (compared with the CPU power).
And many things are simple and functional, where Windows and MacOS
only have colorful icons and crashes.
You do not have to wait long for a keypress to echo and the reason is mainly
the ingenious operating system: SunOS.

The first Sun3's were the 3/50 workstations (wide pizza box) and
the 3/160 servers (12 slot chassis). The configuration of one
3/160 with several diskless 3/50 was very popular.

Next came the 3/110 (tower or desktop, 3 slot) and the 3/E
(without any chassis, could be plugged in a VME bus chassis).
Both machines weren't very popular so they are quite rare now.

But the next generation of Sun3's, the 3/60 (wide pizza box)
and the 3/260 server (12 slot chassis) were the best selling
machines. The 3/160 could be upgraded to a 3/260 by replacing
CPU and memory. The 3/60 could be ordered with a color
graphics card (before only the 3/110 had color graphics).

The 3/80 workstation (pizza box) wasn't actively sold by Sun
anymore because Sun now started with the new Sparc series.
The machine isn't any faster than the 3/60, but despite this
facts the 3/80 was sold in large numbers which shows the
popularity of the Sun3 series.

The last Sun3 was the 3/470 server. This machine was again
considerably faster than the 3/260. The 3/260 could be
upgraded to a 3/460 by replacing the CPU. But Sun's
marketing acivities were already focused towoards the new
Sparc generation and so the 3/470 is very rare.